Is Google becoming intelligent? Well here’s an example of seemingly intelligent behaviour. The interpretation of abbreviations. Look at the screenshot. I typed in “vuelos baratos a ny” (cheap flights to ny). Google, being Google, correctly interpreteted the ny to mean “Nueva york”. Note the embolded keywords in the results. It reminded me of IBM’s chess wizard Deep Blue beating Kasparov back in 1996. The debate was whether a good database of stored human behaviour processed by a super-fast computer could be more “intelligent” than a human. This is what I think is heppening at Google. Many thousands of people every day use abbreviations and since Google records what people click on it can ”learn” from us what the appropriate connections are. Conclusion: Google is not intelligent, its just good at emulation.

Unfortunately, I’m one of those people who have mates who send jokes and other curiosities by email and a while ago I recieved a photo of Toronto’s CN Tower. In fact it was a sexist joke because in the foreground was a young well endowed girl. What has this got to do with universal search? Well it seems many people saw this image and linked to the page that contains it with the words “CN Tower” in the anchor text. The result you can see in the screenshot. Or try typing CN Tower in Google.es. I’m sure this is not what Google intended would show up for this keyword but it goes to show just how “algorythmic” universal search really is.

At last search engines have started to allow webmasters to segment their pages into indexable and nonindexable parts. Up to now it was only possible to set a whole page as indexable or not. Yahoo is the first to do this, lets hope Google follows. 

First Google gave preferential treatment and more screen coverage to algorythimically determined “authority sites”. Fair enough. But now they have gone a step further and given some sites a Google map pointer aswell. Look at all the screenspace devoted to just one site. So much for variety in search results.